Product Quest Podcast

Today, we welcome our special guest, Rob Schade. Rob is the Chief Customer Officer of Strategyn. Strategyn, of course, is the innovation firm founded by JTBD pioneer Tony Ulwick. Rob was actually the second employee of Strategyn over 20 years ago and has personally been part of the JTBD’s development from a theory where we just talk about milkshakes to a repeatable process that innovators can actually use. For our listeners, let me make an impassioned plea for why you’ll want to listen to this episode from beginning to end. The most critical part using JTBD is framing… or establishing the bounds of a project and define your market to be pursued. Rob has led this activity perhaps more than any other person in the world. So let that sink in, Rob has framed more JTBD projects than anyone else; so hang with us today as we’ll explore some tips for how to do this well. Additionally, Rob has had some other interesting experiences, including owning a night club in New York City. I personally have a lot of questions about that!

Our guest today is Wolfram Nagel Senior UX Designer at TeamViewer. I think it’s fair to say that Wolfram has been in UX before it was cool and has worked in different companies and as a freelancer. He’s published a book on Multiscreen UX Design, is co-founder and main curator of designmethodsfinder.com, he’s a public speaker and regularly publishes insightful articles on wolframnagel.medium.com. In addition to that the likelihood to meet him at a Jobs-to-be-done or UX Meetup is quite high. So, today we will take a deep dive on how UX and Jobs-to-be-done are a match made in heaven.

Decisions shape the future. Making better decisions is critical for people and for society. Businesses make strategic decisions all the time about where to invest, who to partner with, where to advertise and much more. Customers make decisions about what products to buy and to use. Innovators, designers and engineers make decisions about what to build so that customers purchase and use what they make Businesses have become more and more data-driven, with data science becoming ubiquitous, but conventional data science has its limitations. In this episode we discuss why understanding causality is critical for making better decisions and how leading businesses are increasingly looking to incorporate causality in their data driven decision making Our guest today is Paul Hünermund. Paul is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Innovation at the Copenhagen Business School, his research interests lie in the area of innovation, firm strategy, R&D policy and causal inference. He is the co-founder of causalscience.org, a platform for fostering knowledge exchange between industry and academia on topics related to causal data science. References mentioned on the show: Causal Machine Learning and Business Decision Making by P. Hünermund, J. Kaminski and C. Schmitt The Book of Why by Judea Pearl

In this special episode we review all the guests we interviewed on the show this year and reflect upon what we learned, what we liked and the questions we wished we had asked! This episode turned out to be much longer than planned, so here are the timestamps if you want to jump to a particular guest: 01:40          Ruth Hartt 15:50        Lance Bettencourt 25:04       Ronan and Jane 31:20        Indi Young 40:14       Jim Kalbach 53:00       Dan Adams 1:05:30    Beat Walther 1:13:00    Jan Schmiedgen 1:22:00    Katerina Kozludzhova 1:25:10     Murat and Francesco 1:31:17      Michele Hansen 1:41:45     Lindsay Zaltman 1:54:50    Min Basadur 2:04:30    Gerry McGovern 2:11:20     Giorgio Pauletto 2:19:50     Tim Macarthur 2:24:10     Joe Leech 2:32:00    Ian Kerr & Jason Frasca 2:37:15     Sergei Ikovenko 2:46:20    Tony Ulwick

Today, we welcome our special guest, Tony Ulwick. If you’ve worked in, read about, or even heard of JTBD, then you know his name. Tony is the creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation, known as ODI. ODI takes this theory, this philosophy of JTBD and presents it as a repeatable process.  Tony is well published with his key work from 2005  “What Customers Want" or his HBR articles “Turn Customer Input into Innovation” and “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map” which have become classic reads of our field.

Dr. Sergei Ikovenko, a world-renowned TRIZ expert with impressive credentials in engineering and patent law, dives into the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. He discusses TRIZ as a systematic approach to innovation, illustrating its evolution and application through real-world examples. Sergei highlights how TRIZ can reshape product development, aligning engineering solutions with market needs. He also shares personal anecdotes on the immigrant experience and influential mentorship, emphasizing the importance of communication in problem-solving.

Our guests today are Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca from Emergent Futures Lab (emergentfutureslab.com), a strategic innovation consulting firm focused on radical innovation. Iain and Jason founded the Emergent Futures Lab in 2018 as a platform for the rethinking of creativity, invention, and change. They have developed a number of new tools including the Innovation Design Approach, which we will be talking about today. Iain Kerr is a designer working at the intersection of creativity, ecology, and emergent systems. He is a Co-Director of the MIX Lab at Montclair State University within the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation He is a co-founder of SPURSE, an award winning creative design consultancy that focuses on social, ecological and ethical transformation. He regularly works as a consultant, lecturer and workshop leader on creativity, innovation, and design and has done so for institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Columbia University, Parsons, Yale, and others. He formally studied philosophy and architecture, but his deep immersion in the wilderness around Vancouver where he grew up spawned many interests that have since expanded to cover a wide range of fields including ecology, complexity science and evolutionary theory and as you will see these are major influences on his work. Jason Frasca is a native New Yorker and an entrepreneurial business executive, marketing, and sales professional who has worked with Fortune 500 and nationally recognized clients in many diverse sectors of the economy. He cut his teeth at Boardroom Reports, a business newsletter to executives, where he learned Direct Response Marketing from several legends in the field With Iain he is also a Co-Director of the MIX Lab at Montclair State University where he teaches innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability, marketing and provides mentoring to startups. His research revolves around disruptive innovation models and frameworks for entrepreneurship and he uses 3D Printing as a mechanism to demonstrate and teach these methods and approaches. You can find out more about Iain and Jason here: emergentfutureslab.com   Referenced on the show: Books by Deleuze Books by Stephen J Gould Books by Elisabet Vrba The Wright Brothers, David McCullough The Box, Marc Levinson The Art of Noticing, Rob Walker

Our guest today is Giorgio Pauletto. Giorgio is Head of Strategy and Innovation at SIG, the Industrial Services of Geneva. SIG is Geneva’s public utility company, providing water, energy and telecommunication services to the canton of Geneva. Giorgio studied management sciences and engineering at Stanford, got a doctorate in econometrics at the university of Geneva and was a visiting fellow both at the Hoover institution in Stanford and then at Yale. Before joining SIG, he worked as a Technology, Strategy and foresight advisor for the state of Geneva.  Today we will be talking to Giorgio about  how to foster innovation within a large public utilities company and the challenges that one faces. And we will also talk about how to get a glimpse into the future through foresight also known as future studies.   Referenced on the show: The Corporate Startup, Tendayi Viki Black Swan, Nassim Taleb Looking at Mindfulness, Christophe André

Today we have an exciting guest Joe Leech. Joe is an energetic coach and advisor to CEOs, has a lot of experience working with startups, high growth tech unicorns and Fortune 100 companies. 20 billion $ in revenue go through the products he has worked on, an impressive number. He has a background in psychology, more specifically in neuroscience, was a primary school teacher for some time and has written a book I want to recommend about Design and Psychology: Psychology for designers, a pocket guide. Besides that he is also a great and very entertaining speaker and writer. Today however will focus on C-level questions and how Jobs-to-be-done can help answer them. So, stick around if you want to learn why Jobs-to-be-done is one of the keys to successful C-level strategy.   Referenced on the show: Psychology of Design, Joe Leech Empowered, Marty Cagan  Nokia “Burning Platform” memo, Stephen Elop The Last Blockbuster Netflix documentary

Today we the Product Quest Podcast Team discuss the challenges you face when it comes to Jobs-to-be-done projects. What can go wrong? What needs to be in place before you start? And of course what can you do to overcome them? What are the learnings from all of our experience in applying Jobs-to-be-done in many industries?